Low-end Lumia 620 shows Nokia’s and Windows Phone’s scaling trouble

$249 for a Windows Phone 8 device is cheap, but is it cheap enough?

Today Nokia announced the Lumia 620, a range of colorful handsets running Windows Phone 8 that should have an unsubsidized cost of around $249. The phones will be released in the first quarter of 2013, initially in Asian and African markets and later in Europe and South America.

The 620 will be available in the four process colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) and white, and to these Nokia is adding two new colors: lime green and orange. These two colors use a new process Nokia calls "Dual Shot" in which two colors are layered on top of each other, which apparently creates "depth effects" and "textures." The lime green covers are a "dual shot" of yellow and cyan; orange, one assumes, is yellow and red.

The lime green phone appears to have a cyan glow to it, presumably as a consequence of the "Dual Shot" coloring.

Nokia

The Lumia 620 isn't Nokia's only low-cost Windows Phone play. First announced in October, the Lumia 510 went on sale in India yesterday. Rs. 10,499 (about $193) will get you a 4-inch 800×480 screen, a single core Snapdragon S1 processor running at an unspecified clock speed with 256MB RAM, 5 megapixel real/VGA front cameras, 4GB internal storage, 802.11 b/g/n (2.4GHz only, no 5GHz), Bluetooth 2.1 (not 3.0 or 4.0), and GPS (but no GLONASS)—running not Windows Phone 8, but rather Windows Phone 7.5.

The 510 range is available in red, yellow, cyan, white, and black.

The Lumia 510 range. Cheap, but are they cheap enough?

Nokia

Spec-wise, the 620 and 510 are about as low as Nokia can go when it comes to Windows Phone devices. The guts of the Lumia 510 are very mundane indeed. The problem for Nokia and Microsoft alike is that Android phones go lower still. For example, Huawei has just released an Android 4.0 handset in China called the T8830. Like the 510, it has a 4-inch 800×480 screen. It pairs this with a dual core 1GHz Cortex A9 processor (believed to be the Mediatek MT6517), 512MB RAM, and a 3.2 megapixel rear-facing camera. The cost appears to be about $110—a little over half the price of the Lumia 510.

Neither the Huawei phone nor the Lumia 510 run the current operating system version (though the Lumia is likely to be upgradable to Windows Phone 7.8, at least), but Android 4.0 is a lot closer to Android 4.2 than Windows Phone 7.5 and 7.8 are to Windows Phone 8.

Nokia needs cheap, low-end phones to be able to compete in the fast-growing African and Asian markets but at the moment, Windows Phone still can't match Android's pricing, leaving the Finnish company forced to stick with S40 (under the "Asha" brand) in these markets—despite how uncompetitive it is. And rather than improving the situation, Windows Phone 8 seems to have made the problem even worse, as it makes the bar for hardware specs even higher. $249 is a cheap smartphone in Western markets, but far too much to be competitive in emerging ones.

That's not to say that there's no place for more expensive phones in these markets. Nokia has also launched a variant of the Lumia 920 in China called the Lumia 920T. Nokia hasn't published a full spec for the 920T, but it's broadly similar to the 920: 4.5-inch, 1280×768 screen, Qi wireless charging, and so on and so forth. It has some important differences, however. It supports China's TD-SCDMA phone technology.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus system-on-chip used in the regular 920 doesn't support TD-SCDMA. To do that, Nokia has had to switch to the Snapdragon S4 Pro, and while the CPU portion is very similar to the S4 Plus, the GPU isn't—it's quite a bit faster.

As a result of this, China probably has the fastest, most powerful Windows Phone 8 device that money can buy.

Update: Although China Mobile claimed prior to the 920T's launch that it used a Snapdragon S4 Pro MSM8960T system-on-chip with the faster GPU, it appears that the company was in error, and that the actual handsets use the S4 Plus-class 8260A, meaning that their GPU is the same after all.